Starvation Comes with Shorter Growing Seasons

There is no way for seven billion people to live on a quickly cooling planet—hundreds of millions will probably perish starting in populations of grain importing nations first. Global cooling will kick us where it hurts the most, in our stomachs, which will be deprived of foods because of shorter growing seasons. With global warming we had a chance of increasing agriculture growing zones pushing further and further north but with cooling its going to be a massacre. Humans will die in mass and populations will be reduced as elite desire.

In early October we had a snowfall disaster in Russia where crops were buried under more than a foot of snow. A state of emergency was declared in three regions of Khakassia. Harvesting of feed and grain crops temporarily suspended. “The bread went under the snow.” For agrarians, snow on top of unharvested fields is a real disaster. At first came the heavy rains so harvesting couldn’t begin. Then came the frosts and snow, from 10 to 40 cm (4 to 16 inches) deep. Under the snow is the harvest of 2017 … A real disaster.

Climate change is poised to affect the world’s food supply in three key ways, experts say. “There will be impacts on the quantity, quality and location of the food we produce,” said Dr. Sam Myers, a medical doctor and senior research scientist studying environmental health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We’ve never needed to increase food production more rapidly than we do today to keep up with global demand,” Myers told Live Science. That is going to be impossible in a cooling world where contracting growing seasons will collapse yields.

Costs of the increasing snow fall will come from many directions including crop losses. As much as $100 million in damages after dozens of onion storage sheds and facilities collapse during the harshest winter in memory. The buildings collapsed under the weight of up to 40 inches of snow that buried

Earlier reports said shops had also been running short of fruit and vegetables. Three Marine Atlantic ferries made the crossing with much-needed food stocks, but more ice means ferries have been stuck since then. “Something we haven’t seen in decades” While sea ice is normal between mainland Canada and Newfoundland, this year has been worse than usual.

“The ice conditions and the weather systems that we’ve been experiencing this winter, particularly this week, have been something we haven’t seen in decades,” said Darrell Mercer with Marine Atlantic last week. He said the ice began forming in early February, more than a month earlier than last year, and has been building ever since.

In Russia early heavy snowfall trapped many the shepherds and one of them froze to death. Three homeless people also froze to death in the capital Bishkek. Fallen snow brought a lot of problems for farmers. According to local authorities, 27% of the crop is left in the snow. Many farmers have not yet managed to collect half of their crop.

Food Shortages

Many have been on alert for the diminishing food stocks and there was a panic in Russia over buckwheat, which was running in short supply. A poor buckwheat harvest has seen Russians across the country bulk-buy the grain amid the national economic crisis. What is happening there will spread around the world as the already shortened growing season diminishes grain and other agricultural products. No matter how much deflation hits the world economy we are going to only witness inflation in food prices.

Food security is vanishing from the world as ideal agricultural conditions of the past half century disappears. 2014 saw the extension of a historic drought across the US West. Croplands withered or were fully abandoned. Water rationing was enforced. Well tables dropped. The price of many vegetables and meats have skyrocketed. California’s agricultural output is critical to feeding the rest of America.

The New York Times reported in 2010, “First it was heat and drought in Russia. Then it was heat and too much rain in parts of the American Corn Belt. Extreme weather this year has sent grain prices soaring, jolting commodities markets, and setting off fears of tight supplies that could eventually hit consumers’ wallets. Grain prices started to shoot up over the summer on reports of a catastrophic drought in the major wheat-producing regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Prices rose not only for wheat, but also for corn and soybeans, since those grains are interchangeable as animal feed and a drop in wheat production could mean increased demand for the other grains.”

In Korea, over a period of 12 months, the price of cabbage—the main ingredient in kimchi, the country’s national dish—rose over 400% to 11,500 won ($10) from 4,000 won two weeks ago and 2,500 won a month ago. “This is the first time that cabbage prices have gone up so much,” Park Young-koo, researcher at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, told the Wall Street Journal. “Since we have monitored the price, nothing like this has happened before.”

Starvation Comeswith Shorter Growing Seasons

Less water and colder weather is not a good formula for feeding 7 billion people. The 2014 growing season — at 134 days — is the third shortest on record. The shortest was 114 days in 1901, followed by 133 days in 1912. Previously, the earliest fall frost in 117 years of record keeping at the Kansas State University Agricultural Research Center at the south edge of Hays, was Sept. 17, recorded twice in 1901 and again two years later in 1903. That means 2014’s first frost broke the previous 114-year-old record by five days.

The amount of available grain will decline as temperatures get cooler. Even if you’re able to harvest it, if the wheat is covered with snow when you harvest it, once that snow melts and turns to water, the seeds become moldy. There is no way for seven billion people to live on a quickly cooling planet—hundreds of millions will probably perish starting in populations of grain importing nations first.

In the key crop regions of the U.S., there has been an extended cooling trend that persists despite the immense human CO2 emissions released over the last two decades. These and other NOAA charts depict cooling trends across a wide swath of American agricultural production representing the main corn, soybean, spring and winter wheat growing areas. Global cooling brings with it high potential for devastation in terms of crop yields.

Geophysicist Phillip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and president of the National Space Society, says, “The next Little Ice Age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” Chapman says. “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning. During the Maunder Minimum, in the depth of the Little Ice Age, hundreds of thousands of people in Europe died from starvation when the climate turned rainy and cold and cut short the growing season. We’re being told there’s global warming, but we’re headed in the other direction . . . we’re right on the precipice of the next ice age. When it happens, we’ll be fighting in the streets for food long before we’re covered by ice.”